City Desk
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By Kathleen Shannon - Producer, Contact - News
Big Sky Connection - A DAILY YONDER/BIG SKY CONNECTION COLLABORATION – A map of Montana news outlets shows people living rurally have fewer sources of local news, which can impact community engagement and accountability. Continued news consolidation disproportionately threatens more rural states. Comments from Daniel Read (REED), research analyst, LOR Foundation.
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Kathleen Shannon
By Ilana Newman for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Kathleen Shannon for Big Sky Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
April 8, 2025 - A new study from the LOR Foundation, an organization focused on rural community development, maps local news outlets in Montana to provide a look at demographics and gaps in coverage. Efforts to map local news have become popular in states like Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota, and beyond.
Mapping local news provides valuable information about where the coverage is lacking and helps funders identify places most in need of support. Daniel Read, research analyst at the LOR Foundation, said the study matters because "data can drive action towards places that are typically underserved by local media or just underrepresented generally in the media landscape."
Read spent two months calling people in Montana to inquire about their local news environment for the study. This included "the librarian and the county clerk, and maybe the manager of a history museum, people who were just likely to pick up the phone," said Read, as well as, contacting every obvious news source. By reaching out to local leaders embedded in the communities, they were able to identify local news sources that might not be obvious from an internet search.
"If they're providing original local news, we wanted them included," Read said. "We were very agnostic to the medium that was being provided." This means they included radio stations that primarily play music but might also include news and podcasts providing original reporting, like Hello Whitefish, a long-form podcast out of Whitefish, Montana.
LOR did not include sources like Reddit, Facebook, and civic news sources like a local chamber of commerce newsletter. Read said that they could see doing another study looking at these more social versions of news, which can be a primary source of information for rural communities without many traditional news sources.
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